


walking in a winter wonderland

by Rozjozbrod



Category: Anne with an E (TV)
Genre: F/M, Marriage Proposal, One Shot, Post-Canon, Shirbert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-12-03
Packaged: 2021-02-26 16:55:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21661642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rozjozbrod/pseuds/Rozjozbrod
Summary: Anne and Gilbert take a walk through an Avonlea winter afternoon.
Relationships: Gilbert Blythe/Anne Shirley
Comments: 14
Kudos: 273





	walking in a winter wonderland

**Author's Note:**

> Renew Anne with an E! Comments and kudos are always appreciated.

Of all the things, lovely and otherwise, in this world of love and splendor, nothing brought her more joy than the first real snowfall of winter. Winter had arrived early that year by any reasonable criteria; the temperature had fallen below freezing as early as November, leaving icy designs on her windows in the mornings and sunsets of slanted, golden light through naked poplars in the evenings. Since then, the days and nights had been positively impregnated with possibility and snowflakes, the winterlands growing more and more splendid with every week that passed. In the haze of summertime, she had forgotten that days could be crisp and bright like these -- that the sun could shine, not burn, and that trees could breathe out their colorful leaves and replace them with white, pristine snowfalls to catch the light. She loved that her breaths floated out of her and stayed a while and she loved the small smudges of smoke that rose from each chimney as if the hand of some divine artist had slipped, just a bit, leaving only a reminder of his gray clumsiness upon the bright, white sky. Winter filled her with wonder and joy-- how lucky she was to gaze upon this earth, to see a world of white frosts.

There was something about this time of year as well… something romantical and strange that whispered itself into the breezes and brought her immense calmness. Perhaps it was that the stress of harvest had finally passed, along with it her first university exams, both pressures having melted like snowflakes upon her quizzical brow. But she could not deny that much of her present cheer was attributed also to the good company of the boy beside her, all rosy cheeks and snowflakes. Admittedly, though she reveled in the crisp air, the season would have been dreadfully more grim without his warmth to leech off of, his hand to hold. She was quietly thankful for the excuse the cold gave her to touch him without scorn, her attachment to him dutifully disguised by his gallant (and wholly necessary) assistance in keeping her from slipping on the ice. Her boots crunched snow underfoot and he pulled her closer and for a brief, shining moment it was as if summer had found a handhold in her heart, warming her all the way to her backbone.

He looked lighter now. She was not so egotistical as to believe that the cause lay solely in her, though she suspected that she played some small, yet significant part -- her ego would allow her a kernel of self-righteousness, after all. But his lightness extended all the way from his shoulders to his tread, as if he had suddenly found himself free of an immense weight, and was taking his first steps as a free man. It gave her a small thrill to think of him as such-- as a _man_. He was such a lovely contradiction in her eyes; somehow in the same moment she could look at him and see the person he would become, the person he was, and the person he had been when they had first met. Beneath the new, sharper angles of his jaw and cheek, she remembered how he had been soft, once. How his eyes had shone with youth and mirth but now they held wisdom, truth. Perhaps he was still all of those things--- young, soft, wise, true. But the boy had been replaced, transformed. And he walked freely now, his hand in hers. 

His hand. Oh, how breathless and strange to hold him thus after so long with only his words and a few pieces of paper as a substitute. She used to think about him and how his warm hand had passed over the page and given careful words specifically to her. She still had not gotten used to it, to the thrill it caused to see her name preceded by the words ‘ _my dearest’_ in his elegant script, nor the way he seemed so sure about unloading his heart onto her. If the things she adored about him could be enumerated, there at the top of a list that spanned for ages would be his brown eyes in the fading winter sunlight, the snow in his curly hair, and the insurmountable depth of his human heart. After everything he had endured, she was astonished and moved at how easily he seemed to care for her.

Suddenly awash in affection for him, she turned and pressed a kiss to his shoulder where it met his arm-- the one she hung off of so greedily. 

“What was that for?” He asked, the quiet joy in his voice perceptible only to her in the entirety of the winter widescape.

“My lips were cold.”

“Is that so?” 

“Dreadfully, horribly cold.”

Then, into the winter air sparkled his laugh and he promptly turned himself to her, put his hands to her cheeks, and pressed his lips upon hers. _This_ , she realized with an inward sigh, was something that she would never get used to either. After so long aching and burning for him, years of it without her having even known, it was a pleasure undefinable to be able to feel his lips, soft and pliant, beneath her own. 

A brisk winter wind ruffled past them and pulled at her hair and jacket and she had the quiet but irreverent feeling that even the earth itself was content to see them together, so incandescently happy. It was as if the chill had pressed a hand to the small of her back and pushed her closer into his embrace-- into his warmth. He had kissed her only five times in all the years of knowing him, each one more startling and singular than the last. Though she had immortalized all of them later, carefully, in her journals, she knew deep down that this was not something that she would readily forget-- not until her soul was lifted far from this plane of existence and perhaps even then she would still recall the way he shivered under her touch when her hand wound itself in his curls, the way he liked to trace just the outline of her jaw with the pad of his thumb. The first time he had kissed her there had been apologies, declarations in the way he had pressed his lips to hers. Oh, there had been _volumes_. She had felt the depth of his feelings for her in the way he had trembled, slightly, but kissed her anyway. 

Their second kiss had been her response to his question: did she really have feelings for him? Beneath his query there had been a dam of insecurity, like he was preparing himself for her to refuse him. She didn’t. She kissed him _yes_ , _yes_ , and _yes_. She suspected that it had surprised him just how much she could feel for him-- that this endlessly-infuriating, ever-present figure of her youth could become someone that she would want to press her lips to and who could make her heart race beneath delicately woven skin. He had quite readily responded back to her, without spoken words, that the two of them would embark on this adventure together, interwoven.

The third kiss had been a joyful goodbye, but a goodbye nonetheless, and beneath every goodbye, no matter the circumstance, hung some amount of nostalgia. She had waved him away with a smile without knowing that the next few months would serve only to prove that time was both fluctuating and static, finite and eternal. They _had_ spoken --- but his letters had sustained her only to the point that one glass of water could quench the thirst of a dying man and not save him. She had never missed someone so desperately before. 

And thus, kiss number four had been a rediscovery of a dizzying kind. He had kissed her top lip and then the bottom one, his own impossibly soft, and then he had been so bold as to let his mouth open to her, and she had felt a burning for him in that moment that had spread from her skin to her very core. Even her journal would not know the depth of her desire after their kiss-- but her cheeks had been pink for the rest of the night as she remembered how his tongue had traced her own and how his fingers had whispered delicately over the soft skin of her neck to wind themselves in her hair. She suspected he had been equally affected --- she would never forget the hum that had vibrated in the back of his throat as she had kissed him back, nor how dark his eyes had been under the lamplight, how flushed his cheeks. It had never occurred to her that anyone could be hungry for her, not in that way, but that night he had kissed her with the careful pressure of a man holding himself in check. As if he had known that if he had pressed a little closer, kissed her a little deeper, they would have wandered into scandalous territory-- walked through fire -- together. 

Number five had been soft, delicate. The rapidly-growing Delphine had been plagued with illness-- a kind of sickness that had scared her father and Gilbert, and they had sent for a doctor in the dead of night, leaving Anne with the baby. But the men had been overcautious and while they had been away, Anne had watched the fever break and soothed the small thing into a heavy sleep. Upon returning with the doctor, they had seen both Anne and Delphine asleep in the rocking chair, fireside, swathed in blankets and glowing softly with warmth. Anne had awoken to the delicate caress of her cheek and had opened her eyes to see kind, brown ones looking back at her with impossible tenderness. 

“Anne.” He had whispered. “It’s time to go to bed.”

For a moment, whilst still heavy with the tendrils of dreams, she had forgotten that this baby she held tightly against her bosom was not of their own flesh. But for a brief second, she had seen through the confines of time and felt the delicate intimacy of a future domesticity-- one in which the good-hearted boy with the soft brown eyes had given her the ultimate gift -- a family of her own, at last. After that he had led her up the stairs to his bedroom and had pulled her in for a kiss so light, so sweet that she could taste their future. Beneath every press of his lips she felt hundreds, thousands more. Then he had left for the couch and she had succumbed back to sleep, entourned by blankets that smelled like him. 

And now this, their sixth, felt like all of them. She was tender, she was hungry. She was discovering him and she was joyful and she was so desperately, completely, ardently in love. She had known it, surely, before. But she had known it on a level so superficial that it was not true yet, not really. This was not a marble sunburst, this was no marble hall and there was no shining knight riding down. This was Gilbert. This was Anne. This was their love in all of its youth and unpredictability. 

So she told him. The cold wind aided her words as they took them from her lips and blew them into his heart. She hardly registered that she had not spoken them to him yet, only that her heart would have exploded had she held them in for one second longer. “I love you, Gilbert Blythe.” 

He pulled apart, only slightly, to look her in the eye-- perhaps to see if she was serious. _Oh_ , his scrunched, confused expression was so familiar to her now, but this time she would not fade away from it. She would let her eyes overflow with the love that coursed through her and then maybe, finally, he would believe that he deserved her. Whatever he had been searching for, he found it there and she watched a smile begin slowly in the corner of his mouth until it was a sunstorm. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She could count the freckles on his skin. 

He kissed her again. _Seven_.

“Marry me.” He whispered between presses of his lips that felt like forever. 

She kissed him back. Yes and yes and _yes_. She was sure that they cut an impressive and poetic figure, the only two beings in color and love upon a never-ending horizon of white. 

**Author's Note:**

> RENEW ANNE


End file.
